I'm trying to compile a list of games that use PCM samples (non-DPCM). Let me know if you can think of more examples, I've almost certainly missed a ton of famicom games.

The earliest game on this list is currently Tag Team Pro Wrestling (April 1986), so if you can find anything earlier that would be great to know. Also, I've only come up with five examples of it being used in/for music: Action 52, Battletoads, Battletoads & Double Dragon, Great Waldo Search, and Skate or Die 2. Are those the only ones?

Note: Not all samples in the following games are guaranteed to be PCM, as some games use a combination of PCM and DPCM. This is simply a list of games that contain at least 1 PCM sample in them.

Is there an easy way to tell? I tried FCEUX and Nestopia, and they both mute raw PCM when you mute DPCM. I seem to recall that the bell sound in Tecmo World Wrestling, and the crowd sound in Punch Out were raw PCM. But I could be remembering wrong. It could have been NESticle where I observed those.

Is there an easy way to tell? I tried FCEUX and Nestopia, and they both mute raw PCM when you mute DPCM. I seem to recall that the bell sound in Tecmo World Wrestling, and the crowd sound in Punch Out were raw PCM. But I could be remembering wrong. It could have been NESticle where I observed those.

The DPCM has a very characteristic quality/sound to it, and ringing at its specific frequencies (if you have absolute pitch you might be able to tell which one). PCM sound usually has a pretty distinct quality advantage that will sound "unusual" compared to DPCM if you're looking for it.

The other giveaway is that the screen will usually pause for the duration of the sound. If there's significant animation going on, it's probably not PCM... though there are counterexamples to this (e.g. Battletoads' intro) and IRQs also get around it somewhat (e.g. Ultimate Stuntman). A static screen can be a pretty good hint though, in most cases.

Finally you can verify by putting breakpoints on $4011. If you get more than one in a frame, you're probably getting PCM. You could certainly rig up a lua script or otherwise hack an emulator to listen for that and give you a display to let you know. (I think the new "overclock" mode for FCEUX does this to automatically detect PCM and disable the overclock, actually?)

Ooh, thanks! This is more just research I'm doing for an upcoming podcast episode about high quality sample playback on the NES. I have a spreadsheet I'm putting together, but also thought it would be good to have a forum post that's google-able, incase anyone else wants to look this up. It's always nice having lists of this kind of stuff.

Memblers wrote:

Is there an easy way to tell? I tried FCEUX and Nestopia, and they both mute raw PCM when you mute DPCM. I seem to recall that the bell sound in Tecmo World Wrestling, and the crowd sound in Punch Out were raw PCM. But I could be remembering wrong. It could have been NESticle where I observed those.

za909 showed me a method where you can search for 4011 writes using the debugger in FCEUX. The emulator will pause whenever something comes up. There are a few false-positives to look out for, like DPCM samples that have that "pop" on them will trigger your breakpoint. But you can tell if it's regular DPCM vs raw PCM... if the rest of the sample audibly plays after hitting the "run" button again, then it's just DPCM. If it constantly pauses every time you hit "run", then it should be a full fledged raw PCM sample trying to play.

If you want to see something unusual, look at Star Tropics 2. It uses $4011 as a volume control for the triangle channel.

So did Startropics. It's part of its "fade out" routine for the music.

Super Mario Bros. also does it to lower the triangle volume for some music tracks. (It has a gradual slide, +/-1 per frame, which actually produces an audible buzz during the transition-- the NSF kind of sucks for this because it always starts at 0, so a lot of tracks start with that buzz.)

Ah the podcast is Retro Game Audio. All episodes can be streamed or downloaded from our soundcloud. We have 20 episodes so far, this'll be our 21st. https://soundcloud.com/retrogameaudio

NovaSquirrel wrote:

Smash TV seems to use it for the "Let's go!" and the sound on the title screen.

Yes! I forgot to put that in the list, but I did double check all the vocal samples and those are all PCM.

Memblers wrote:

I kind of think the "I'm bad!" sample from Bad Dudes might be raw PCM, I'm not wanting to play through a level at the moment to find out though.

It is! Which is funny because it's so bad sounding anyways.

Something I didn't mention in the OP was bit-rate, since it's a little over my head, but something that's kind of neat is that some samples have a lower bit rate. Before researching this I assumed everything was either 1-bit DPCM or 7-bit PCM. But Gauntlet 2, MULE, and Skate or Die 2 should all be using 4-bit samples.

To the best of my understanding, it's because they limited themselves to using a "smaller space" (less values) than 7-bits, but would've otherwise been 7-bit had they not gone out of their way to do that. I think of 7-bit as like the default bit depth for the NES' raw PCM, but it could be limited to anything smaller.

The PC speaker could naturally do 1-bit PCM, for instance, and so could a few other systems (ZX, etc.). Did it originally appear on another platform?

If you can get your samplerate high enough to be above the audible threshold, 1-bit PCM can effectively become equivalent to more bits (i.e. PWM). Eg. 160 kHz 1-bit output could sound like 40 kHz 2-bit.

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